Thursday, June 24, 2010

Bad Juju

Bad Universal Omen: When mechanic calls in a panic and says, "You gotta come see this right now. I mean, like, now now."

So, off to the shop...

Mechanic: You're not going to believe this.Scat: Try me (this week I might believe pigs can fly, but he would be hard pressed to believe me).Mechanic: This is your wiring harness. Well, sort of...

He opens the hood of the van where he has exposed the radiator which has little pieces of wire and fuses and odds'n'endssoldered to it. Wires are piled everywhere inside. Many are broken. Most only have bare, metal ends twisted together with no insulating caps and are frayed or rusted. It looks like its been assembled by seven-year-olds with their daddy's spare cast-off wire clippings and the odd switch or fuse welded wherever it seemed to fit. Not control boxes, nothing. A virtual spaghetti pile of disaster. One's first thought is, "How did this vehicle ever run?" One's second thought is, "Calling this a wiring harness is an insult to wiring harnesses."

Mechanic: Do you have any idea who did this to your vehicle?Scat: (stunned silence)Mechanic: Guess not. Well, to tell you the truth, I really can't even work on this car. Not at all. They don't sell the entire wiring harness and this one has obviously been yanked out and very, very, very poorly replaced. It's like every wire and every fuse and it seems to bypass the cooling fans so I'm not sure where they're plugged into the system at all. Not even really sure how long it would take me to figure it out so its sort of cost-prohibitive to even try to figure it out. (Translation: It's time to let it go and at best euthanize it for parts).

Scat: (drool)Mechanic: Yeah...see, I'm gonna see if I can get it to run well enough to get it off my lot, but I just wanted you to know I had nothing to do with this, uh...Scat:...sabotage. You had nothing to do with this sabotage. Isn't there a version of that by the Beastie Boys? Very appropriate background track.Mechanic: (He smiles. He is relieved). Yes. Phew.

He meets the wild-eyed Scat stare and stops looking quite so relieved and more like he's at a funeral. This is appropriate because it is fact that this car was "born" with the correct wiring harness. It is also fact that one of his brothers-in-arms did this to our van.

Or that a pack of evil tinker fairies descended on it in the night after be-spelling us all and they did it. Yeah. The lasting effects of the spell would account for the fact that Buddy's mouth has been slack and his head tilted at an odd angle ever since the return from the shop. Dang fairies.